Paris in the 16th century

At the beginning of the 16th century Paris was officially the capital of France, but the King, Louis XI, had little trust in the Parisians, and resided in the chateaux of the Loire valley, rarely visiting the city.

It had served as a royal palace since the beginning of the fourteenth century and had enjoyed favor under Charles V of France, who paid the architect Raymond du Temple to transform the castle of Philip Augustus into a primary residence and show-place for his rule.

Du Temple heightened the building, added a new suite of domestic chambers, and transferred the majority of the king's extensive book collection to its two-story library.

A century and a half of neglect, however, had left Charles V's Louvre dilapidated and stylistically out of keeping with contemporary tastes, and Francis I enjoined Pierre Lescot to once again update the structure.

His son, Henry II, made his official entrance into Paris in 1549 with a lavish procession and ceremony; the first Renaissance fountain in the city, the Fontaine des Innocents, was commissioned as a tribute to the King's arrival.

The scholar Etienne Dolet was burned at the stake, along with his books, on place Maubert in 1532, on the orders of the theology faculty of the Sorbonne; and many others followed, but the new doctrines continued to grow in popularity.

The targeted killings quickly turned into a general slaughter of Protestants by Catholic mobs, known as St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, and continued through August and September, spreading from Paris to the rest of the country.

On 1 August 1589 Henry III was assassinated in the Château de Saint-Cloud by a Dominican friar, Jacques Clément, bringing the Valois line to an end.

The siege was long and unsuccessful; to end it, Henry IV agreed to convert to Catholicism, with the famous (but perhaps apocryphal) expression "Paris is well worth a Mass".

[5] During most of the 16th century, the Kings of France kept Paris under their close personal control, and greatly reduced the power of the merchants and leaders of the guilds, who had previously played a large part in governing the city.

A decree of 1554 took away the right to vote of the gens mécaniques, or artisans of Paris, and required that, of the twenty-four members of the municipal council, ten and had to be officers of the royal government, and seven of the merchants had to have sufficient wealth that they did not need to do any real business.

In 1523 the Lutheran Jean Vallière was condemned, hanged and then burned at the Pork Market at the porte Saint-Honoré for denying the virgin birth of Christ.

With the emergence of religious reform, many Protestants formed their own schools, outside the control of Catholic Church; classes sometimes included girls as well as boys.

It was regularly visited by poet Pierre de Ronsard and author François Rabelais, who described it as a meeting place of voyagers, students and bandits.

The dyeing workshops in the faubourg Saint-Marcel, along the Bievre River, produced six hundred thousand pieces of dyed cloth a year, and made the fortunes of some Paris families, including Gobelin, Canaye and Peultre.

The manufacture of certain luxury products, such as belts, gloves, and perfumes, and women's bonnets were another important part of the economy, which flourished after the royal court returned to Paris from the Loire Valley.

Leather workers, mostly from Spain, Italy, and Hungary, installed their workshops in the Saint-Marcel quarter, while German woodcarvers began to make furniture in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

[18] The merciers, who sold fabrics, buttons, ribbons and other items used in making clothing, as well as pots, dishes, and other household products, were the most important commercial guild.

However, very few Paris merchants had the ambition to create commercial empires; they used their fortunes instead to buy government positions or make marriages which allowed them to advance into the lower ranks of the nobility.

The Pont Notre-Dame, connecting the Île de la Cité with the Rue Saint-Martin on the right bank, was on the site of an ancient Gallo-Roman bridge.

The new Pont Notre-Dame was built of stone between 1500 and 1514 in the new Renaissance style, under the direction of a monk from Italy, Brother Joconde, and the designer-constructor Jean de Dayac.

The leading French artists in Paris were François Clouet, Jean Cousin the Elder, whose success allowed him to build a grand house and studio on the modern rue Visconti in the Marais; and Antoine Caron, official painter for the last Valois kings.

The most important French sculptors working in Paris were Jean Goujon (1510–1585), whose works include the decoration of the Fontaine des Innocents, the facade of the Lescot wing of the Louvre, the Caryatids on the music platform of the ceremonial hall of the Louvre (1550–51); and the Four Seasons decorating the facade of the Musée Carnavalet (1547); Pierre Bontemps (1505–1568), who created sculptures for the tomb of Francis I and a funeral monument for Charles de Marigny (1556), now in the Louvre; and Germain Pilon (1525–1590), who made the extremely realistic funerary figures of Henry II of France and Catherine de'Medici for their tombs in the Basilica of Saint Denis, as well as the 385 grotesque masquerons which decorate the Pont Neuf.

He formed a literary circle with Joachim du Bellay and a group of other poets, and published a series of books of poetry on love and romance and a volume of erotic poems.

It was designed by another Italian, Domenico da Cortona, and begun in (The original was burned by the Paris Commune, but the central portion was faithfully reconstructed in 1882).

In 1564, Delorme was commissioned by Queen Catherine de Medicis to build an even more ambitious project; a new royal residence, the Tuileries Palace, near the Louvre.

The pillars were inspired by the monastery church of Cluny, and the soaring interior is taken from the gothic cathedrals of the 13th century, but Cortona added details and ornament taken from the Italian Renaissance.

whose choir was built in beginning in 1550; St-Gervais-et-St-Protais features a soaring gothic vault in the apse, but also had a transept a more sober classical style inspired by the Renaissance.

(The baroque facade was added in the 17th century).in the Saint-Etienne-du-Mont (1510–1586), near the modern Pantheon on Mont Sainte-Genevieve, has the only remaining Renaissance rood-screen (1530–35), a magnificent bridge across the center of the church.

The flamboyant gothic church of Saint-Nicholas-des-Champs (1559) has a striking Renaissance feature; a portal on right side inspired by designs of Philibert Delorme for the former royal residence, the Palace of Tournelles in the Marais.